I probably would not carry any extra DEF around ever if I was you. If I had a long trip planned, I would fill it up and not worry about it. It doesn't seem that hard to come by on the road. Most truck stops should have it if you really needed it.

I snuck out to the garage for a little while this afternoon to start mockup on the first 8 foot overhead cabinet.

I've kept some of the more interesting pieces of wood for the overheads as they are visually dominent.

In a perfect world the cabinet will be "3 boards deep by 2 boards tall" .. or not.
This is definitely going to be a "that looks about right" building technique.. and if I get lucky one of the dimensions will look right at an actual board width multiplier so I don't have to cut every board its entire length for fitment

This one piece of wood is crazy dark compared to the others.. I think I'll put it in the center facing downward on the bottom of the cabinet.. should look pretty cool that way.

...with my buggered up ankle the hobbling around is slow going. I actually worked up a sweat just doing this. Time to go elevate it above my head again

I just realized.. the other thing I lose if I trade the van for a 4x4 is the ceiling fan.

With the amount of work I put into that thing.... I'm not trading this van in.

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Don't sweat the 4x4 conversion too much. I've been pulling with a 2WD van for years. 99.9% of the time you don't need 4x4.

Options to increase your utility:

Spare rear wheels with agressive studded snow tires.

Limited slip differential. My old van had one of these. It did surprisingly well.

Air locker rear differential. A little more xpensive, but will work even better than limited slip.

Always carry chains. All year long. I barely made it out of the swell pulling a 8k # trailer in the mud without chains a year ago. We then drove into another mud-fest around Moab and I came to a spinning stop. Putting on full truck chains got me unstuck and into camp. I've also had to chain up to make it over the Divide once.

Ideally, I would like to carry two sets of chains. Cable chains for highway use, and full lug chains for really knarly stuff.

Don't sweat the 4x4 conversion too much. I've been pulling with a 2WD van for years. 99.9% of the time you don't need 4x4.

Options to increase your utility:

Spare rear wheels with agressive studded snow tires.

Limited slip differential. My old van had one of these. It did surprisingly well.

Air locker rear differential. A little more xpensive, but will work even better than limited slip.

Always carry chains. All year long. I barely made it out of the swell pulling a 8k # trailer in the mud without chains a year ago. We then drove into another mud-fest around Moab and I came to a spinning stop. Putting on full truck chains got me unstuck and into camp. I've also had to chain up to make it over the Divide once.

Ideally, I would like to carry two sets of chains. Cable chains for highway use, and full lug chains for really knarly stuff.

Much like the automatic chains, maybe you could install an automatic sanding system, like those used on trains?

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In december we had a tour of Schroyer's private truck collection in Ohio. Many of their trucks had sander boxes built in (Phil's looking at them in the photo) but I didn't get a photo of the actual boxes at the time. Basically a box in front of the rear dually wheels that would pour sand in front of the wheels when needed.
I don't know if they were a factory option or something they added afterward?

Big steel chain with bars made of twisted links with straight cross bars. Rattles like hell on the road and can't be driven much above 30mph. You must have grown up with these in Canadia, eh?

For added benefit, get chains with welded & hardened cross bars.

Chains with cross bars mounted at a diagonal might be a good compromise.

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The last set of chains I had didn't have the crossbars in the links, but they sure came in handy on my old Impala wagon. I had to use them on pure ice one night on a trip from Wichita to Lawrence. Took me 7-1/2 hours to make the trip at 30 mph, stopping periodically to check on people in the ditches and then stopping at pay phones along the way to report the mile markers. That was 19 years ago, before most folks had cell phones.

This will let me get started on the ceiling/upper cabinets. by going with the 5/15-18 rivnuts my rivnut sizes match the 80/20 bolts I'm using so I should be able to use the same fasteners for everything and bolt the 8020 straight to them